Obfuscation is Easy

These just tickle me - what can I say?

Relativism either applies to itself or it doesn’t.
If it does, then it’s only relatively true.
If it doesn’t, then there’s an absolute truth.

A puzzle by Isaac Asimov: What word in the English language changes its pronunciation when it is capitalized?

Well? C'mon there are at least 12.

Incidentally, Lewis Carroll submitted two letters, but the Times didn’t print them. Perhaps it’s just as well — he was far ahead of everyone else: “I noticed for the first time the fact that though [the moon] only goes 13 times round the earth in the course of the year, it makes 14 revolutions round its own axis, the extra one being due to its motion round the sun.”

Why would Carroll think such a preposterous thing? Everybody knows that the moon is as flat as the earth!

WikiLeaks released half a million US national text pager intercepts. The intercepts cover a 24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.

It's disturbing to realize that someone, possibly not even a government, was routinely intercepting most (all?) of the pager data in lower Manhattan as far back as 2001. Who was doing it? For that purpose? That, we don't know.

The Lone Gunmen record all my phonecalls.

I wonder if one if the prime drivers for entrepreneurship is bad management.  I have to think that bad management pushes a lot of capable people out of their day jobs, and those people go on to become entrepreneurs.

Imagine a world where managers always recognized and rewarded their most capable people. It would be hard for a rational employee to leave a great job for a ten percent chance of creating something even greater. But leaving a boss who is Satan's learning-challenged little brother is relatively easy.  And if the general economy isn't serving up wonderful job opportunities at other companies (thanks in part to bad management) then you can see why people gravitate toward starting their own companies.

I think that on the whole, it's much more profitable if one works at what one is good at. If I go it alone, I have to be good at all job roles at once. As it is, working in a company, I can specialise.

Dear Kayli Anneke,

Since the internet will last forever, I feel comfortable putting this letter online, knowing you will read it someday.  Perhaps someday very soon, since you’ll be growing up in Cambridge, England, and everyone knows kids from Cambridge typically write their first thesis by age six.

Read the whole thing. It's lovely! (And funny)

“Were I asked to focus the New Testament message in three words, my proposal would be adoption through propitiation, and I do not expect ever to meet a richer or more pregnant summary of the gospel than that.”

—J.I. Packer, Knowing God